The 7-minute dental morning huddle: agenda and template

A dental morning huddle should run seven minutes, cover eight segments in a fixed order, and end with every open item owned by a named person. Each segment has one speaker, one number or item, and one decision it has to produce. The agenda below is the sheet: print it, put it on the counter, and run the same seven minutes tomorrow.

Most huddle templates are a list of topics. This one is a minute budget. The difference is the last column, the decision: a segment that ends without one gets cut, not extended. The glossary entry on the morning huddle covers what the meeting is. This page is the sheet you run it from.

The seven-minute agenda

Same time every day, with a small buffer before the first patient: 7:50 for an 8:00 start. Everyone stands. The runner keeps the clock, fills the decision column as the huddle goes, and reads it back at the close.

Print this page from your browser; the two tables come out as plain grids, and there is no separate file. Fill the number column before the huddle. The decision column gets filled in the room.

Three numbers per role

Every role brings exactly three numbers, pulled before the huddle, from the same place every day. Three, not five: five per role turns into a report, and nobody reads a report at 7:50. The report names below are OpenDental's; other systems have equivalents.

Two notes. Plans presented yesterday that left without a date start the treatment plan follow-up cadence; the huddle gives each of those patients a first owner. The office manager's third number duplicates the list owner's report on purpose: the owner says whether the list got worked, the manager has already looked, and the mornings they disagree are the useful ones.

What should a dental morning huddle cover?

Yesterday, today, and the list. Yesterday's result says whether the month is on track. Today's schedule, open time, unconfirmed patients, and open treatment plans say where today's production is at risk and where it can be recovered. The outreach list is the standing work that fills next week. Each segment leaves with three things:

• A number, not an impression. "The schedule looks light" becomes the gap in dollars and the open minutes by column.
• An owner with a name. "The front desk" owns nothing. A person does.
• A time. "Today" is not a time. "By 9:00" is.

Not on the sheet: clinical case discussion, staffing questions, anything that needs a laptop and a chair. Those are real meetings, and they are not this one.

How long should a morning huddle take?

Seven minutes, standing, at the same time every day. Ten is defensible; fifteen means the schedule is being read aloud. The constraint is not the team's patience but the chair: an opening at 10:00 is fillable at 7:55 and hard by 9:30, so a minute in the huddle is a minute the fill list is not being worked. The schedule gap response system picks up where the third segment ends: who works the fill list, and how the outcome gets logged.

Seven minutes also survives a bad morning: two people out, a patient early, the phone ringing. A fifteen-minute huddle gets skipped on those days, and those are the days it was needed.

Who runs the huddle?

The office manager or the lead front desk person, sheet in hand. Not the doctor: the doctor speaks for one minute, listens for six, and is the most expensive person in the room to have talking about confirmations. The runner owns the clock and the last column: cut a segment that runs long, read every owner back at the close.

In a single office the runner usually holds a second role too, and still brings that role's three numbers. In a group, the runner is the same role at every office, so a manager reading nine sheets knows who filled each one in.

The single-office sheet and the group sheet

The agenda does not change with size. What changes is who holds the roles and who reads the sheet afterward.

Single office

Five roles, usually three or four people. The office manager runs it and often brings the scheduling coordinator's numbers; the treatment coordinator may be the front desk. Roles collapse; numbers do not. One person with two roles brings six numbers and speaks twice. The sheet lives on the counter, filled in before 7:50, with yesterday's sheet clipped behind it so the close can be checked: did the owner of yesterday's item actually do it?

Multi-office group

Same agenda, same order, same sheet, every office, same seven minutes. The group version adds two things. First, the roll-up: each office's yesterday-against-goal and production-on-the-books become one line per office, rolled up to the group, which is what the operations lead reads instead of attending nine huddles. The roll-up belongs in the production dashboard, not on the sheet; Production Command carries production against goal per office and rolled up, so the sheet only has to carry today.

Second, the rule that makes the roll-up trustworthy: every office fills its sheet before the huddle, not after, at the same time everywhere. A manager can then read every office's sheet by 8:15 and see, without calling anyone, which offices started the day against a number and which one has ninety open minutes and no name next to them. That is the argument in The daily standard: the same small thing from every office, every morning, visible without a phone call.

What makes huddles die after three weeks?

Four things, and they compound. Each has a fix that lives on the sheet, not in a memo.

• Nobody brings numbers. Week one, people pull the reports. Week three, they estimate from memory, and a huddle run on estimates is a conversation. Fix: the runner checks the number column before starting, and a blank cell gets skipped out loud, so the gap is visible.
• It becomes a schedule read-aloud. Reading today's appointments aloud feels like work and produces nothing; everyone can see the schedule. Fix: the number column carries totals and exceptions. Names appear only where the names are the decision: the fill list and the unconfirmed segment.
• No decision is produced. A segment that ends with "okay" instead of "Maria calls the top three by 9:00" was information, not a huddle. Fix: the runner does not move on until the last column has something in it, even if the entry is "nothing to do."
• No owner. Decisions with a name get done; decisions owned by "the front desk" get discussed again tomorrow. Fix: names on the sheet, read back at the close, checked against yesterday's sheet the next morning.

A huddle is not a meeting about the day. It is seven minutes in which each of the day's open items gets a number, a name, and a time.

Where the sheet stops being paper

Paper is the right place to start; a single office with a steady team can run this on paper for years. It strains when pulling the fifteen numbers takes longer than the huddle, when the fill list is a printout from Monday, or when nine offices each fill in a slightly different sheet and the roll-up is a spreadsheet someone assembles on Tuesday. That is the part we built. Morning Huddle puts one huddle screen per office in front of the team at sign-in: today's schedule and production on the books, open time, the ranked outreach list, and unconfirmed patients, filled in from OpenDental. Patient Outreach rebuilds the ranked call list for each office every morning and writes every outcome back to the chart, so the sixth segment is a glance rather than a reconstruction.

Print the two tables, run them tomorrow at 7:50, and keep yesterday's sheet clipped behind today's. When the numbers take longer to pull than the huddle takes to run, see how Morning Huddle fills the sheet for every office before anyone signs in.